For this first review, I chose the game Rock Band as a multimedia tool that is effective for developing an understanding of rhythm, which is a foundational concept of music that can applied outside the game. Over this past summer, my best friend and I played a lot of Rock Band. On many days we would play for hours after getting home from work, and I always was on drums. When we first started, I found the game challenging, but within an hour I was able to complete full songs and start to earn currency in the game. I quickly found myself very motivated to improve in the game as I could choose to increase my difficulty whenever I wanted for any given song to earn higher scores and larger payouts to buy clothes and new instruments for my character. My experience of feeling engaged by the gameplay and motivated to improve reflects Rieber’s (2005) discussion of what makes a learning experience delivered through a game effective, particularly the importance of making sure difficulty increases proportionally to the player’s skill level. Having control over the difficulty at every stage of the game encouraged me to constantly challenge myself, leading me to progress in skill faster.
Fascinatingly, as I progressed in the game, my skills also seemed to transfer to my real life, longtime hobby of playing the drums. Although Rock Band uses coloured rectangles instead of traditional sheet music to indicate which note to play, and its drum layout differs significantly from an actual drum kit, I noticed my ability to hold a consistent rhythm in drum patterns outside the game was improving. Rieber (2005) discusses how a game can simplify an underlying complex model for the learner, allowing them to engage with a concept and improve on a skill relevant to the concept without having to follow a traditional learning path to understand the underlying model, which is often much more confusing and time consuming. Rock Band in this case uses a simplified notation of coloured boxes corresponding to colours on the drums, which players must hit when they reach a line on the screen. These visual cues help players develop rhythm without requiring them to know music notation or theory concepts.
Another strength of Rock Band as a learning tool is that its gameplay applies the modality principle, which suggests that learning can be supported by presenting relevant information through both visual and auditory channels (Low & Sweller, 2005). Rock Band combines visual prompts which indicate the correct notes to play and the beat of the song with auditory cues coming from the player hearing the song while they play. Players must connect what they see with what they hear, developing a sense of rhythm through repeated practice as they work through songs.
Despite Rock Band being a great example of the strengths of learning through gameplay, it may fall victim to a common limitation of transferring game based learning to skills outside of a game, as described by Rieber (2005). Players can often become overly focused on achieving high scores instead of reflecting on the progression of their real skills. He describes this as “twitch mode” (Rieber 2005). I was definitely motivated by the game’s currency and moving through levels, but this raises an interesting question about if my focus more strongly rewarded learning real musical concepts or just becoming better at the game itself. Rieber (2005) suggests that dedicated time after playing a game for learners to consciously reflect on how their experience connects to the concepts they are trying to learn through the game can help mitigate this weakness.
References
Low, R., & Sweller, J. (2005). The Modality Principle in Multimedia Learning. In R. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (pp. 147–158). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rieber, L. P. (2005). Multimedia Learning in Games, Simulations, and Microworlds. In R. Mayer (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (pp. 549–568). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rock Band Gameplay with friends:
Expert Mode Drums Gameplay:
Easy Mode Drums Gameplay: